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Archive for the 'spreadsheet' Category Page 3 of 3



Another Free Excel Geocoder

Stumbled across another free Excel spreadsheet that uses the Yahoo geocoder to convert addresses to geographic coordinates. Simple, basic, but does the job.

A link to a compressed version of ExcelGeocoder is available at the top of this page. Run the program to uncompress the spreadsheet, then open it up in Excel. It requires Visual Basic for Applications, so it won’t currently run in OpenOffice, but apparently VBA compatibility is coming soon to OpenOffice’s Calc spreadsheet and other components.The program uses Yahoo’s Geocoder, and requires you to enter a Yahoo ID in the Settings And Instructions tab, a remainder from when you had to register to use the service. Since registration is apparently no longer necessary, you can enter anything you want for a Yahoo ID, but you have to enter something. Paste your address data into the appropriate columns in the spreadsheet, click on the Geocode button in the upper left, and you’ll get back latitude/longitude for those addresses (up to 5,000 per day is allowed by Yahoo).

If you want to use this geocoded data in Google Earth, you can use excel2kml, or if you save the resulting data in CSV format, you can use csv2kml to convert it into a Google Earth file. You can also convert it into a point shapefile using software that I’ll be covering soon.




Another Excel To KML Converter

Just stumbled across another Excel .XLS file with macros that will convert a list of coordinates and descriptions into a Google Earth KML file. Not particularly fancy, but easy to use and works well.

excel2kml uses VBA, so you’ll have to have Excel (i.e. it won’t work with OpenOffice). Open the file in Excel, and enable macros if they’re disabled for security purposes. First page is the data sheet, with a set of sample data already in place: Name, Latitude, Longitude, and Description are the only data fields available. Paste your data into the data sheet (up to 50,000 lines), enter Alt-F8, and run the “Generate KML” macro. A file called “myfile.kml” will be created in the root directory of the C-drive; you can modify the file name and destination in the “File Details” tab. That’s it – tested it with the sample data and a file of my own, and works perfectly. You could probably modify it quite easily to meet any additional requirements you might have.




Importing Spreadsheet Data Into Google Earth

One of the features offered by Google Earth Plus is the ability to import data in spreadsheet format, specifically the CSV format: Comma-Separated Values a simple text format where data values are separated by commas, and each set of data is in a different line. But Google Earth Plus has a limit of 100 points for data import. When you consider that there are free options that will convert spreadsheet data into Google Earth’s KML format without this size limitation, then it’s not all that much of a “Plus”.
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